After a decade, a standalone spin-off, a DLC crossover, and a remaster, Alan Wake returns to his place under the flashlight spotlight. Alan Wake 2, unveiled at The Game Awards in December, takes the series — and the developers at Remedy — in a new, more gruesome direction. We have a lot of questions about the upcoming survival horror sequel: Did Alan escape from the Dark Place? How do the pieces of the Remedy Connected Universe fit together? How much live-action TV in the universe will we see?
Well, we don’t know yet. Details are scarce. But for now, here’s all the information we can shine on Alan Wake 2.
Watch the trailer of Alan Wake 2 reveal
It’s our first glimpse of our returning author antihero, and he’s moodier than ever. You can tell by his bleak, story-based metaphors. And from his beard.
We’re already seeing much of the game’s dark psychological horror: murderous doppelgängers, forest murder scenes spilling over into rainy New York streets as reality coalesces. One of those realities happens to look a lot like the town of Bright Falls, where the first game took place.
However, I’m sorry to say that after multiple close rewatches, it doesn’t look like Alan’s hoodie and jacket combo has made a comeback. Mourn with me.
What is the release date of Alan Wake 2?
While there is no set release date, Alan Wake 2 will be released in 2023. If you’d like to see more before then, we hope to get more details soon. Remedy originally planned to share more in the summer of 2022. However, in the anniversary update in May, Sam Lake – Creedy’s Creative Director and lead writer of Alan Wake and Control – said that “all is well” with the sequel, but Remedy wasn’t quite ready to show it yet.
“A lot of the game is playable. We’re repeating it. But we’ve been talking for the past few months and we’ve decided that we won’t show anything big this summer.” Lake explained that we would have to wait a little longer for a good demo and a new trailer.
On PC, Alan Wake 2 will be an Epic Games Store exclusive when it launches. you can find it shop page herebut there isn’t much to see yet.
What do we know about Alan Wake 2’s gameplay?
No specific details have been announced, but we do know that Alan Wake 2 is being designed as Remedy’s first survival horror game. While the first Alan Wake and its downloadable sequel, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, had their share of horror elements, they were action games at the end of the day. Here, those horror elements will take center stage: hopefully the genre shift will allow Remedy to better explore what they call a “layered, psychological narrative.”
Beyond that, we can only speculate about what the gameplay will entail. If you’re already familiar with Alan Wake, you’re probably aware of his flashlight combat mechanism, where light could dispel the Dark Presence possessed by Alan’s enemies and make them vulnerable to gunfire. Since Alan is holding something that resembles a homemade flashlight in the reveal trailer, we can safely hope to see something similar in the sequel. But probably at a different pace.
And given what I know about the survival horror genre, I’d start mentally preparing to scavenge for batteries if I were you.
What can we expect from Alan Wake 2’s story?
I’ll be honest, it’s hard to say. Alan’s current situation is a little fuzzy. At the end of Alan Wake, Alan banishes himself and the Dark Presence that threatened the city of Bright Falls to the Dark Place, a shadowy otherworld below the city where reality can be literally rewritten. While the follow-up to American Nightmare Alan showed how he penned his escape back to the real world and destroyed an evil doppelganger, it’s strongly suggested that the standalone game took place in his imagination while he’s still trapped in the Dark Place. . Likewise, the “Monsters wear many faces” tagline in the trailer and the short shot of a potential deputy Alan’s cackling, bloody face are strong indications that evil clones remain a concern.
Like I said, it’s all a bit fuzzy. Not to mention the possibility that Alan himself was written in reality by another writer in the first place. If recursive reality rewriting isn’t “layered and psychological,” I don’t know what is.
What we do know is that Control’s AWE expansion, which completely merges the two series into the so-called “Remedy Connected Universe,” ends with Alan giving a simple warning, seemingly from two years in the future: “It’s happening again. “
What else is there to know?
The bid to get an Alan Wake sequel is a long story of canceled prototypes, rollback of publishing rights, and struggles to secure funding. Back in 2015, Polygon recorded part of that storydetailing how a previously abandoned prototype of Alan Wake 2 would form the basis of Remedy’s 2016 action game, Quantum Break.
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